Lost in the shuffle of a couple big decisions of the Supreme Court this week was a Antonin Scalia(!) authored opinion that will give Attorneys General an enourmous amount of power to go after absuvie banks. The NYTimes Editorial lays out how the case came about:

As the current mortgage crisis was building, banks engaged in a wide array of bad practices. They lent to borrowers who could not afford to pay off the loans. They misrepresented loan terms, and they employed deceptive “teaser” rates to mislead their customers.

State attorneys general opened investigations and filed lawsuits. In 2005, then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York asked several national banks about lending practices to determine whether blacks and Hispanics had been charged higher interest rates than whites — and whether the banks had violated fair lending laws.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of the Treasury Department, sued to block Mr. Spitzer. It claimed that a regulation it issued under the National Bank Act barred the states from enforcing state fair-lending laws. Two lower courts agreed.

Basically, Eliot Spitzer saw Bush and Co weren't acting to curb abusive lending. And so, when he tried to do it himself, Bush's regulators sued to stop him. After Spitzer lost, that was pretty much the end of states being able to force national banks to follow their own fair lending laws. Luckily, that decision didn't matter, because we live in a world of perfect markets, with the less regulation the better. So, as a result of that decision, the US was set on a course of happiness, candy canes, and endless prosperity...

But then a crazy thing happened this week. The Supreme Court, with Scalia as the deciding vote, decided Spitzer was right. All of a sudden, Attorneys General all across the Country were back in the business of protecting the residents of their state from national banks.

Which brings to our Attorney General, Tom Corbett. Thus far, at a time of an incredible economic calamities, Corbett has shown little interest in actually protecting consumers in PA, no matter who is causing their suffering. But with this decision, he just lost one more excuse why he cannot be more active.

Corbett wants to be Governor. I hope that he knows that a smart Democrat in 2012 will point to his time as AG, during this once in a generation downfall, and ask him why he didn't stand with ordinary Pennsylvanians.